In many commercial fields it is necessary to decorate containers, such as for example, plastic perfume bottles, lipstick cases, and the like, in order to enhance their sales appeal and to impart to the customers a sense of the quality of the product. It is also necessary to decorate these items quickly, in order to maintain low costs, and the decorative material must have a good degree of permanence in order to promote resale of the item and to assure the customer that he is purchasing a quality product. It is also essential that the decorative material have no blemishes therein, lest the customer have an adverse reaction as to the quality of the product in the decorated container.
The processes previously used to decorate such objects have generally taken the form of printing or stamping techniques. One of the more successful of these techniques is that of hot stamping. In this process a tape is used to carry the material, generally either a pigment or metallics, to be transferred to an article. The tape is generally Mylar, and includes a release coating, the vacuum metallized or pigmented coating, and an adhesive coating thereon. When heat and pressure are applied to the tape the release material liquifies and permits the metallized or pigmented coating to be transferred to the article, and the adhesive insures that this coating is positively secured to the article.
In the prior art, when it was desired to apply a multitude of colors or decorations consisting of a plurality of colors to a cylindrical article, such as for example, the surface of a round plastic bottle, it was necessary to apply each color separately and in a separate machine. For example, if it was desired to apply a decoration containing the colors blue, green and gold, it was necessary to first apply the blue color in one machine from a transfer tape as described above, and then the gold in a second machine from another tape, and finally the green color in yet a third machine from still another tape, all in separate operations. These operations were generally accomplished in hot stamping processes in which pressure and heat were applied to the transfer tape causing the material on the tape or leaf to adhere to the surface to be decorated. In each of the machines the tape contained a solid color and the design produced on the article depended upon the configuration of the die. Therefore, when two or more colors in registration were to be applied by such stamping processes, the part to be decorated had to be accurately inserted in the subsequent hot stamping presses for each different color so that the next color thereon was in accurate registration with the previous colors placed on the surface.
It has also been proposed to utilize a single machine when two or more colors in registration are to be applied in the roll stamping process. However, in that case, not only must the article be accurately located in the press prior to the second stamping process, but the roll leaf or tape must be removed from the machine and replaced by a tape bearing the next color, and the die must be replaced and realigned with the article in order to insure that an accurate hit with the proper die is made in the next pass, during the application of the next color. While this system may appear to be more economical than utilizing separate machines, the problems and costs involved are still substantial. Therefore, while such hot stamping processes can be extremely economical in one-color decorations, the machine and labor time costs have become exceedingly high with multi-color work.
There are several other techniques which have been employed in an attempt to provide such multi-colored decorations. Thus, for example, a hot stamping machine including a number of die stations disposed about the periphery of an indexing rotary table has been used. The articles to be decorated are placed upon rotary mandrels upon the rotating table, so that the articles pass across the surfaces of stationary concave dies at each die station, with a single color tape disposed therebetween at each such station. These techniques have not proven to be totally satisfactory, however, since they do not employ a single transfer tape, involve problems of foil or tape wrinkling, and are quite costly and of limited versatility.
There have thus been attempts to provide techniques by which multi-colored decorations may be applied to articles from a single continuous transfer tape. Thus, in my U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,648,604, issued Mar. 14, 1972, and 3,463,651, issued Aug. 26, 1969, I disclose methods for applying multi-color designs to a web, preferably of Mylar. By employing these techniques by which colors are applied from various foils to a single continuous web as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,648,604, or by conventional printing processes, as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,463,651, it is possible to apply a multi-color design to an article from a single continuous transfer tape. The need to employ such complex procedures in order to prepare the transfer tape becomes quite expensive, however, and has thus led to a search for a simpler, less expensive procedure to produce such multi-colored decorations. That is, in order to prepare such transfer tapes it has been necessary to prepare engraved cylinders for each color to be applied to the tape, and such a procedure is so costly and time consuming that it has only been economically justified where extremely large quantities of the tape are to be employed. The search for a more easily and cheaply prepared transfer tape for producing multi-colored decorations has thus continued, especially for the preparation of smaller quantity lots.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a transfer tape to decorate the surface of an article with a registered multi-color design in a continuous process utilizing a single apparatus.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a single inexpensive transfer tape having a predetermined sequence of colors thereon to apply a multi-colored surface decoration to an article. Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a transfer tape to apply a multi-colored surface decoration to an article by a process which is relatively inexpensive and substantially faster than those previously proposed.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a transfer tape to apply a multi-colored surface decoration to an article by a process in which a single machine is utilized and which requires no transfer of the article to be decorated or changing of transfer tapes or dies.